Down dark yet familiar streets

BEING THEREEvery day, 60-year-old JJ McEntaggart, who is blind, feels and hears his way along the bustling footpaths and across the dangerous streets of Dublin city, writes Róisín Ingle

ON HIS WAY to work, JJ McEntaggart tunes in to the disparate elements of Dublin's soundscape the way a conductor tunes into every instrument in the orchestra. He observes the click-clack-click of a teenager's stilettos as she runs for the bus. The trundle of a double buggy. The pounding of a drill. A lorry unloading. A baby's cry. He hears two men arguing, a taxi turning sharply into Cathedral Street and a group of women directly in front of him talking, giggling, walking, oblivious to his presence. He stops, head cocked, until this potential hazard passes him by.

"I'm not a morning person," he explained earlier at 8am, over porridge and tea in Clonturk House, the adult home for the blind in Drumcondra. Dark-haired staff member Pauline is all chat and smiles as she prepares medication for some of the 15 men, mostly over 70, who live here.

"I'm a grump this early, I always have to tell Pauline to stop being so bubbly," says the 60-year-old. "It's not natural. I say 'would you ever shut up, it's too early', but she takes no notice. You are lucky to get me as good as I am this morning." He smiles then, lines crinkling at the edges of his eyes.

AFTER BREAKFAST, we walk out the door to the lobby where every morning JJ lights a cigarette, the lobby walls protecting his lit match from the breeze.

Clonturk House was built as a country residence for the city architect in 1830, back when the area around Drumcondra was mostly fields. JJ says the balustrade of the house was made from the stone of the old Carlisle Bridge which was replaced by O'Connell Bridge. The home is currently on a fundraising drive - they hold regular garden fêtes - for items such as garden furniture, so residents may enjoy barbecues on the patio.

The path from the house to the street is on an incline and at the bottom JJ makes sure to close the metal gate after him. "There's a fella now, Conor, who will come out here later and if the gate was open, well who knows what might happen, you'd hate to cause anyone a mishap. You'd never forgive yourself, so I'd always be careful about that," he says.

It's bin day. They could be anywhere, he says, in the middle of the path or on the road. It's just one more thing to be aware of as he walks along with his white stick tap-tapping the path ahead. He is glad to be on his feet again after spending six weeks recovering from surgery. "You are not as on the ball when you aren't well," he says. There are obstacles everywhere. Overgrown bushes, cyclists on the path. "But the skateboarders are the worst," he says. "They come from nowhere, a pain in the butt."

JJ slows down when we reach the bus stop. "I just kind of sense when I am there, the sound of my stick on the ground changes, I sense objects, but I don't know what they are," he says. When the bus comes, I lead him to the nearest seat on the lower deck. "I normally go upstairs," he says. "If more people go upstairs the bus fills up better and it doesn't get clogged up by people making it difficult for everyone to get off the bus."

BORN IN DUBLIN, his parents were from Co Meath and he spent his early life as a boarder in Drumcondra's St Joseph's School for the Blind. As a teenager preparing for life outside the school, he was brought for walks in the city-centre by the Archbishop's Corps. "We'd spent most of our life in St Joseph's. I remember the first time we went into town. Hearing all that traffic, it was scary. I thought to myself 'how do you cope with that?'" he remembers.

The bus pulls up outside the Gresham hotel on O'Connell Street. JJ has been counting the stops and knows exactly where he is. A street-cleaning machine sits idle in the middle of the broad path. The man in charge of the machine sees JJ coming, then panics when it looks as though there may be a collision, but JJ does a neat sideshuffle and carries on his way. "I sensed there was something there," he explains, as the Dublin City Council worker's face floods with relief.

As we walk, he explains "the tactiles", raised round bumps on the ground that alert him to traffic lights where the "audio bleeps" let him know when it's safe to cross. He puts his hand on the bleeper and senses the vibration, just in case the sound level isn't high enough. "The bleeps go off a few seconds after the green man appears but I would still always wait for them, it's safer, and we fought hard for our audio bleeps so it's important to use them," he says.

It's trickier crossing roads where there are no traffic lights. At the small lane called Sackville Place for example, he could find himself standing for several minutes trying to decipher whether it's safe to cross.

In the past, he says, there might have been two people vying to take his arm and guide him across the street, but people don't seem to have the time these days.

"They are apologetic," he says. "They say, 'I am sorry but I don't have the time to take you across'. Sometimes a taxi-man at the rank will say to a pedestrian 'would you ever help that blind person across the road' and then someone will help or they might get out of the taxi themselves and bring me."

JJ IS HYPER-ALERT on his walk to work. "People think we have improved hearing because our sight is gone, but really it's that we are more focused than the average person. You can't afford to lose concentration for even one moment. There might be cones on the path, maybe roadworks that weren't there the day before. Or you have to watch for people's back-packs and luggage they are wheeling down the road," he says. He has been sent flying in the past by pedestrians not looking where they were going. His stick is slightly dented from a collision the day before with a man who ran across the road before the lights had changed. "We live in the instant-everything society," he says. "Some people just don't know how to wait".

He's happy to explain the best way to approach a blind person who may need help crossing the road. "Always ask whether we need help, that way we can make the decision for ourselves," he says. "You'd be surprised but some people just take your arm and drag you across. We are more security-conscious these days, so that can be a frightening experience." As he walks, a number of people greet him, saying, "How are you JJ. Can I help you to work".

"Some people you know come up and say, 'Guess who?' which they find amusing, but it's confusing and can be frightening, if you don't recognise the voice," he says. People say he is very independent, but he says, "Don't confuse independence with consideration. I don't like to be a burden to people."

There was a monk once, who offered to help him butter his bread while he was on a holiday at Mount Mellory in Co Wexford. "I told him he didn't need to help me, that he should look after other people because it was busy that morning, and the man said, 'The privilege is mine, don't take it away from me', which really struck me at the time."

His week is punctuated by various social activities. He enjoys his swimming class in Belvedere College on Wednesdays. "Can you put in that we are always looking for new members?" he asks. Then there are visits to old friends, but he doesn't like to go too often. "There is an old saying, 'Don't wear out your welcome' and I'd be very conscious of that," he says.

He is a radio addict, a big fan of Declan Carty's late night programme on Newstalk and Donnacha O'Dulaing's Fáilte Isteach on Saturday nights on RTÉ. "I don't suppose you would like it, but I love the old time Irish ballads he plays and his bits of banter in between songs. I would be raging if I missed it."

JJ ALSO ENJOYS Gregorian chant and goes to Mass every day. "But just because I do, doesn't mean I am better than anyone else," he says. "We used to have to go to Mass every day in St Joseph's and I developed a desire to go". If he misses Mass for any reason, he listens on "parish radio" although he's noticed that lately a lot of the churches play their Masses online.

Some evenings, he will go for a bacon sandwich to Sherie's café on Abbey Street, where the staff greet him outside, bring him in and sit him at his usual table.

"If I get down, and you do sometimes do get down, it's only human nature, I think about how I could be a lot worse off," he says. "There's a man, Henry, in Clonturk House, and in the past he would have walked two or three miles with his guide dog. Now he is in a wheelchair through illness, so I do think about how things could be a lot worse for me."

It's 8.50am and we are nearly at the fire station where JJ works as a switchboard operator, taking calls from members of the public. "I'm the type that doesn't like to leave them holding on, leaving them listening to Greensleeves or whatever it might be on the line. I will always come back to them to tell them what is going on," he says. As he makes his way down Townsend Street, JJ explains the "landmarks" he uses to get to the door of his workplace.

There are a few short metal pillars, then a stone telegraph pole and then a squat green metal box. He taps his way along the edge of the path, feeling each one, and when his stick comes into contact with this last "landmark" he knows that he is almost at the workplace door. "That's me," he says, making contact with the door, waving goodbye and stepping inside.